Season 11 · Episode 2

The same season from above the line. Three people work the upper levels of Fliade in shifts from a station on the roof of the world, and keep their backs to the dark, which is the rule. Aravena, the smallest of the three, carries the unit and tells it the log. One evening the unit's own record says something warm and upright stood at the edge of their light for eleven minutes and nobody turned round. Some shifts later the unit is not where it was left: it is standing at the line where the party's own feet once stopped, facing them, and its log says it was carried, and woke, and was held, and slept. Two readings are filed and neither is chosen. And the one who knelt to it, last up the passage, turns round and asks the dark a question, and goes on asking. Then the count: sixty-three shifts of nothing, while the unit's channels fill with what the party stopped seeing — a boulder on every arrival, a withdrawal from the moving shadow and not the light, a voice at the bottom of the passage — until the one who knelt is asked, at last, what the third reading was, and gives it: like a thing at a door, and the boulders are the knock. And the morning after: a stone of the planet's own, carried through the squeeze by one person, set down on the line at the feet of someone standing there in the open, and answered by the sound the party had logged for two years. The log that shift says something happened.

• S11E02C01 Eleven MinutesFliade — the upper junction where the surface party works, the station on the roof, and the line in the silt where the party's own tracks stopThe survey side of the same season, from inside. Aravena, the smallest of the three, carries the unit, sets it at the junction, and tells it the log. That evening the unit's thermal channel says something warm and upright stood at the edge of the working light for eleven minutes, and nobody turned round. Some shifts later the unit is not where it was left. It is standing at the line where the party's own feet once stopped, facing them, and its log says it was carried, and woke, and was held, and slept. Egede says it was returned. Nakagawa says a line was drawn. Aravena says nothing, lifts it, and on the way up, last in the passage, turns round and asks the dark a question.
• S11E02C02 Nothing HappenedFliade — the upper junction, the station on the roof, and the margin below the junction where the survey's light reaches and its people do notThe log says, every shift, that nothing happened, and Nakagawa keeps the count. Meanwhile the unit's channels fill up with the things the party has stopped noticing: a boulder that shifts below the margin every time they arrive, a withdrawal that follows their light's moving shadow and not the light, and a voice on the sound channel, at the end of every shift, asking a question that goes up at the end. Egede wants to answer the courtesy with a gift. Nakagawa wants nothing left that cannot be taken back. Aravena, asked at last what the one who knelt thought, says it: the unit was put where they would find it, like a thing at a door — and the boulders are the knock. The party has been walking in for two years without knocking.
• S11E02C03 Something HappenedFliade — the station on the roof, the upper junction, the squeeze, and the line in the siltThe one act, from above. Nakagawa has slept on it and the answer is a stone: the planet's own, so nothing is left that the planet would keep; carried to the line and set down first, before the work, the way the boulders have been set down for two years; by one person, because a knock is one person at a door. Aravena goes through the squeeze with it, light held low, and there is someone standing on the line. In the open. Where nobody has ever stood. Aravena does the thing anyway, and steps back, and says something the log does not carry, and is answered by the sound the party has logged since its first month and only now knows how to hear. The log that shift says something happened, and the count says how long it had been true that nothing did.